shed plan, the
loss of years of hope and waiting. Before such a possibility tact
and coolness and apparent unconcern were swept away by passion,
brutal and unreckoning: "Do you mean that you have refused Rowan?
Or have you found out at last that he has no intention of marrying
you--has never had any?"

Isabel rose: "Excuse me," she said proudly and turned away. She
reached the door and pausing there put out one of her hands against
the lintel as if with weakness and raised the other to her forehead
as though with bewilderment and indecision.

Then she came unsteadily back, sank upon her knees, and hid her
face in her grandmother's lap, murmuring through her fingers: "I
have been rude to you, grandmother! Forgive me! I do not know
what I have been saying. But any little trouble between us is
nothing, nothing! And do as I beg you--let this be sacred and
secret! And leave everything to me!"

She crept closer and lifting her face looked up into her
grandmother's. She shrank back shuddering from what she saw there,
burying her face in her hands; then rising she hurried from the
room,

Mrs. Conyers sat motionless.

Was it true then that the desire and the work of years for this
marriage had come to nothing? And was it true that this
grandchild, for whom she had planned and plotted, did not even
respect her and could tell her so to her face?

Those insulting words rang in her ears still: "_You must give me
your word of honor . . . it is too late to be sensitive about our
characters_."

She sat perfectly still: and in the parlors there might have been
heard at intervals the scratching of her sharp finger nails against
the wood of the chair.

IV

The hot day ended. Toward sunset a thunder-shower drenched the
earth, and the night had begun cool and refreshing.

Mrs. Conyers was sitting on the front veranda, waiting for
her regular Sunday evening visitor. She was no longer the
self-revealed woman of the afternoon, but seemingly an affable,
harmless old lady of the night on the boundary of her social world.
She was dressed with unfailing: elegance--and her taste lavished
itself especially on black silk and the richest lace. The shade of
heliotrope satin harmonized with the yellowish folds of her hair.
Her small, warm, unwrinkled hands were without rings, being too
delicately beautiful. In one she held a tiny fan, white and soft
like the wing of a moth; on her lap lay a handkerchief as light as
smok